Quotes About Paradox

I see myself..in those pages as she goes back and forth, enjoying simply enjoying the beauties of the moments then chastising herself for having 'no edge' being simple and worse, harmless.

But time is life, and life exists in our hearts, and the more of it that the people saved, the less they actually had.

Mi existencia es incomprensible y ridícula

What he had hoped for was his ruin and what he had feared his salvation.

In that moment Bastian made a profound discovery. You wish for something, you've wanted it for years, and you're sure you want it, as long as you know you can't have it. But if all at once it looks as though your wish might come true, you suddenly find yourself wishing you had never wished for any such thing.

Lo que había esperado resultaba ser su perdición y lo que había odiado su salvación.

He had been through a good deal in the course of the Great Quest – he had seen beautiful things and horrible things – but up until now he had not known that one and the same creature can be both, that beauty can be terrifying.

Yes, and you've never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That's your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water

She thinks that if she gives it up, she'll lose the great abilities she believes she's acquired. It's a terrible paradox really: the mind falls in love with psychosis. The evil seduction, I call it. (186)

Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression.

Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength.

People treated all remote probabilities as if they were possibilities. To create a theory that would predict what people actually did when faced with uncertainty, you had to "weight" the probabilities, in the way that people did, with emotion. Once you did that, you could explain not only why people bought insurance and lottery tickets. You could even explain the Allais paradox.*

In Danny and Amos's working theory, the paradox was now resolved differently. It wasn't that (or at least not only that) people anticipated regret when making a decision in the first situation that they did not anticipate in making the second. It was that they treated 50 percent as more than 50 percent and saw the difference between 4 percent and 2 percent as far less than it was.

Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions.

At which Charion Pratt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox in the choices made by lovers.

I have hated hypocrisy and deception all my life, yet all my life I have been victim to it. That is the terrible irony.

The nearest we ever come to knowing truth is when we are witness to a paradox.

The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.

We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the "French paradox," for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time.

America is simultaneously the most attractive and most repulsive place on the planet. It is most loved and most hated.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.

I am not sincere, even when I say I am not.